Journal: REASON
Noah Mitchell
Part 1: The Main Idea
Reason is a type of knowledge, as are experiencial knowledge, which we have concluded from our own experience, and knowledge from authority, which we base off of others' experience. Reason generally falls into two categories: Deduction and Induction. Deduction is using what you know to conclude something you do not know, while induction is using limited knowledge to make generalizations. However, there are way to make errors in one's reasoning. Making a conclusion that does not logically follow from the premises (what you know) is one example. Other errors include: using false or vague premises, attacking the someone to avoid admitting reasonable defeat, using the conclusion to justify the conclusion, and distracting the listener with irrelevant information to try to prove a point. Yet, we can avoid these errors and make our reasonable thinking rather solid if we take certain precautions. We should know our facts, keep in mind that never will a certain conclusion be both true and not true, define our terms carefully, be intellectually humble and admit we do not have all the answers, and finally, look for different perspectives to gain wisdom on the subject. When considering reason, we should be aware of our brain's natural process of knowing any given thing. We first percieve an object or event, then categorize it into a broader generality. We evaluate what we see, exemplifying certain attributes and downplaying others. We symbolize things into words and terms, and, lastly, we test our ideas.
Part 2: 3 Important Ideas from this Section
1. As part of being human, we possess two endowments: self-conciousness and abstract thought. To be aware of ourselves existing sets us apart from other animals, as does the ability to separate certain ideas from objects, such as colors, numbers, variables, and truth.
2. There is a difference between ignorance and culpable ignorance. To be ignorant is merely to be unaware of certain facts. However, if one is aware that he is unaware, yet act against that knowledge, that person would be guilty of culpable ignorance.
3. In Aristotle's views, the reason we so often cannot attain happiness is because of a confusion between "wants" and "needs." What we want is purely conscious, but what we need is not always so. We do not want what is best for us, but the plan for achieving happiness involves seeking that which is truly good for us (bodily goods, external goods, and goods of the soul).
Part 3: An Image
Part 4: Questioning an Idea
Question: Is the past a completely different idea than the future, or do they balance each other in a symmetric way?
I want to preface my answer by saying that this past friday, I actually had a bizarre dream in which I and several unnamed, unfaced, disembodied people stood in a swirling space of light and euphoria. Whenever one person would touch another, a powerful new perspective would appear to him or her and he would gain awe-inspiring wisdom. In this spiraling condition of indefinite understanding, I would periodically turn to a green digital clock. This clock would often show a time earlier to the time that I noted previously. Although I was at first confused by this unlinear direction of time, I realized in the dream that time was passing by in a kind of slinky-shaped advancement, where it would curve around and fall back on itself or even before itself, while it gradually did progress towards fulfillment. (This idea probably appeared in my dream as a result of a memorable class about the Hebrews' views on time from Sophomore theology.) In trying to figure out what this all means, I jotted down these thoughts about time:
One should think that a logical creation of a four-dimensional life includes a balance of past and present, with equal patterns acting on both sides of one�s present condition in time. It doesn�t take much insight to �realize� this isn�t the case at all. We feel an immutable past �behind� us. In our choice of reality, we simply cannot reach into a past experience; we cannot alter what has �already been done.� Yet, it seems logical that we change the future every second that we live, whether we choose to act or not. We think we �know� what has happened, but we prevent ourselves from knowing the future, choosing to be indecisive of what will happen, and even if we decide, we let something impede us. So the past and the future really aren�t complimentary balances in the course of our lives at all; they�re completely different ideas, right?
Well, no. If we allow ourselves to alter viewpoints, there is a balance of knowledge in past and present. Not many of �actual� instances are retained, but we remember certain things from the past few weeks, and we envision others for the next. You know where you�ll go to school in the morning and where you�ll sit and that you�ll be hungry during fifth period and how your lunch will taste. But the farther in either direction of time, the less we know. Our first few years of life are blank, and so are our last. One simply relies on some trusted authority for knowledge of his infancy, and one trusts society�s idea that he will eventually die in some way. In all possibility, your parents may have raised you in a complete lie, telling you baby stories that never happened at all, which they simply believe to have happened, regardless of reality. Your friends and family and all of humanity may be under the illusion that you are mortal, and they instill that illusion into your being, yielding your body to death. Taking a step further to admit ignorance, the same could be said about control. One has no idea what results his actions create most of the time. Every word and action affects the observer as part of chaos theory inside their brain. The superficial aspect of choice endures through time only through initial perception and contemplative understanding, both of which terribly obscure the choice through bias, worldview, values, reaction, and wisdom. Therefore, since so much of any particular occurrence depends on interpretation, we can alter the past simply by altering our interpretation through further experience pertaining to the memory. This layering of interpretation changes the past for us, and, since the past exists only through memory, the past itself adapts to a new collective understanding.
Consider each layer as a generation, or as ten generations. Then, the history of mankind corresponds to the life of an individual. Humanity has no memory of its conception or its infancy. Rather, we rely on authority to explain the creation of our trusted reality�s existence. We turn to the Bible for creationism, to science and evolution, to ignorance and indifference. These same authorities illuminate knowledge our death, whether through illusion or disillusion, to explain how and why mankind will end. Through history, humanity grows up and remembers certain choices, yet each layer of interpretation obscures the actual event. Some experiences even cause us to completely bury the original interpretation in myth and legend. We remember what we want to remember to satisfy our sense of fulfillment, even if that fulfillment is to repudiate humanity�s prior interpretations. Thus, we go on, content with an insular view of today.